Private Entries from The Blog of Dr John H Watson
by ThePointManDreamer
Summary: Sometimes there are posts that you just can't set to "public." The private content of Dr. John H. Watson's blog. There may or may not be more chapters later.


I've lost friends before.

In Afghanistan.

Before Afghanistan.

In college, when I was 17, I had a friend—Daniel-who was on my rugby team. We were best mates for about a year. Did everything together. One time we took a couple of girls out to a concert near the uni and went out on a bit of a bender after. The girls went home, disgusted with our behaviour (we were a bit wild), and we had a time of it without them, running about the whole of London with our trousers about our ankles. Brandishing a couple of cans of spray paint, we marked our territory with rather impolite pictures until we were kindly escorted home by the police. My college days were exciting, to say the least.

Daniel died in a car accident a year later. When it happened, I felt detached. Almost as if it hadn't really happened, and I had imagined the entire thing. But after a few weeks, it finally sunk in that he wasn't coming back.

That was the first mate I ever lost. But Afghanistan was worse. With Daniel I hadn't been there. I hadn't been in the car, hadn't seen his face as the life went out of his eyes and the pain contorted his mouth into a deadly grimace. In Afghanistan I saw everything. I was the one they were calling as they passed on. Crying out my name ("Watson!"), pleading with me. As if I held their fate in my incompetent hands. I'm a very good doctor. But a very good doctor is nothing in the grand scheme of things. A very good doctor can treat a terminally ill man and still fail miserably. And I often failed miserably. I lost many friends: Davies, Coburn, Garret, Layton, Howe.

To have a life slip from your hands as if it is nothing more than a silken sheet, colour dulled and faded by time and use, torn and battered from the struggles of warfare and too much washing, too much washing to erase the bloodstains and the scars that never really go away…to have that kind of a life slip from your hands, no matter how hard you try with your morphine and your tourniquets and your syringes, to have that life slip from your hands….it forces you to remember that, in warfare, and in all other places, you are not the master. You do not control fate. You are just a leaf. A dried, browned, forgotten leaf, raked aside in autumn, ever fleeing the frosty fingers of winter. Everything is cold, including the body in your arms that you failed to revive.

I have experienced loss before. Death and I are much more than mere acquaintances. Death and I became bedfellows long before the war, and will continue on together until I succumb. It is what it is. I have killed and have been killed, over and over. I died with each life that I'd taken until death was no longer a horror but a dangerous blessing. I welcomed it. I expected it.

I was not expecting Sherlock Holmes. No one ever expects Sherlock Holmes. He is an enigma, a complex and mysterious being that no one has been, or ever will be, able to explain. If Sherlock were explicable he would no longer be Sherlock Holmes but rather some small, inauspicious man with an inauspicious name like Sean Hall or something equally obvious and dull. Sherlock Holmes is anything but obvious. Anything but dull. He is...was...**is**. _Is_ the greatest man I have ever known. And he _is_ good. He is _the best_.

I thought I understood death. I thought I welcomed the danger it brought. I thought I was finally beyond the pain...or at least that the edge had been blunted. I am a military man. I am a military doctor. I have a military doctor's blood stained hands. Blood stained hands that have seen and done things that no hands should ever see or do. Despite all this, I did not expect Sherlock Holmes.

I did not expect his death.

I did not welcome it.

I did not understand it.

I will not understand it.

_I cannot_.

**I will not.**

I must.

He was...is...was...was my best friend. He was so much closer than a mate. So much closer than a brother. His existence expanded beyond himself. My existence expanded beyond myself. Our existences became one existence. And now that he is...

We did everything together. We had tea. We solved crimes. We watched crap telly. He even came on my dates (not that I ever invited him, but he never had much of a sense of boundaries anyway). We chased cabs and fought Chinese cult members and solved ciphers and went hand to hand with the most intimidating, most unbelievably dangerous criminals ever to walk the streets of London.

I've lost friends before.

But Sherlock Holmes was not just a friend. Sherlock Holmes will never be _just_ a friend. He is the reason I am who I am today. But not because he gave me anything. He didn't. At least, not anything I could describe as tangible or even emotional. Nothing like that absolute rubbish people go on about in those idiotic tabloid papers. Sherlock did not intentionally do things for me. What he did, he did for himself, but that was enough. Because he and I became we, and everything one of us did belonged to the other, and that was okay.

I owe him so much. Because he created. He was an artist who created opportunities and possibilities. And in the midst of all that possibility, I became the man I forgot I had once been. The man fresh out of uni with a medical degree. The young doctor who was ready for anything. The young doctor who knew nothing of emotional turmoil. In the midst of the possibilities that Sherlock Holmes created, I found peace. I found the opportunity for peace. Sherlock Holmes was my peace.

And now that he is at peace, I will never have it again. Perhaps the tears will stop (this is all so fresh). Perhaps the roaring banshee wail of grief will fade to background noise as the years go on (right now it is deafening, what am I even writing, I cannot seem to balance anything against anything). But I will not be tranquil. I will be restless for the rest of my life.

I have known death.

But this is not a death. It is an echo. And it will sound, over and over, rippling, waving, circling about me, orbiting me forever. And my life will go on. Painfully, slowly, it will move. Whether I wish it to or not, it will progress, and I will live. But the shadow, the ripple, the wave, the lack of that great man's presence, will follow me and circle me just like the solar system he refused to understand. And I will constantly feel his force.

And I will never be at peace.

I have lost friends before.

In Afghanistan.

Before Afghanistan.

But Sherlock was not Daniel. Sherlock was not a piece of ragged silk. Sherlock was not Davies or Coburn or Garret or Layton or Howe. He was, is Sherlock Holmes. The most human, the best, the greatest man. My best and closest friend, my existence, my peace.

**Sherlock Holmes was my hope.**


End file.
